Killzone HD on PS3 features bug fixes and Level of Detail improvements

Killzone HD for the PlayStation 3 will benefit from a number of enhancements and bug fixes when it is released on October 24, according to an interview on the Official EU PlayStation Blog.

Guerrilla Technical Director Michiel van der Leeuw said that the "team even solved a few bugs we hadn't discovered when the original Killzone went to gold master".

"The Offices level from chapter 2 is a good example. In the original, there were a couple of pillars that the player could just walk right through. The bug slipped by us due to a very, very late change to the content," he added.

"The Killzone HD conversion team solved the problem by painstakingly recreating the physics mesh and merging it back into the game."

Aside from bug fixes, Guerrilla has also spruced up the visuals for the game's HD re-release.

"Where possible, the Killzone assets we retrieved have been resampled or recreated at a higher resolution," said Senior Programmer Frank Compagner. "Textures, for instance, were originally designed at twice the required size and then downscaled to fit into PlayStation 2 memory. For PlayStation 3 that’s no longer a concern, so the game uses the full-sized textures. Similarly, the menus and HUD-elements have all been upscaled and reworked to look good in 720p."

The PS3 hardware being far more powerful than the PlayStation 2 has allowed the team to create the best version of the game possible, while remaining true to the original.

"A lot of the improvements to the game have been facilitated by switching to the more powerful PlayStation 3 hardware," said Leeuw. "The frame rate is smoother, the shaders are of a better quality, the LOD settings have been tweaked to nearly always show the highest level of detail, and the engine now applies MSAA filtering – which, by the way, looks really sharp on a lower-polygon title like Killzone."

And that's not all. The game will also feature Trophy support and and tweaked controls so they are more familiar to players of Killzone 2 and 3.